Imec, Solvay claim 5.5% efficiency for OPV modules

PARIS – Nanoelectronics research center IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) and chemicals company Solvay SA (Brussels, Belgium) have announced they have developed an organic photovoltaic module with a certified efficiency of 5.5 percent, which they claim is a world record for a module.

Imec said it has developed a dedicated inverted bulk heterojunction architecture for polymer-based solar cells. The architecture is claimed to simultaneously optimize cell light management and increase device quality.

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With this architecture, and a proprietary Polyera semiconductor in the photoactive layer, a team of Imec and Solvay researchers said they developed a process to integrate inverted bulk heterojunction solar cells in an efficient module that uses 95 percent of the aperture area to generate electricity. This resulted in a module-efficiency of 5.5 percent on a 16 cm² aperture area, Imec and Solvay claimed.

Commenting on the results at the module level, Tom Aernouts, R&D group leader of organic photovoltaics at Imec, declared: "They are an important step towards upscaling organic solar cell technology to high-volume production. With further device and module structure optimizations and optimization of the photo-active material of the cell, we will continue increasing efficiency and lifetime, which are essential advancements for developing an industry-relevant technology for organic solar cells."

In Dec. 2011, Imec, Polyera and Solvay claimed they had achieved an efficiency of 8.3 percent for polymer-based single junction organic solar cells in an inverted device stack.

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What is the projected cost reducions ratios when compared to silicoln or sigs?
Also at the module and panel sizes with structure costs include.
It neds to be 1/4 the cost at the panel level tobe cost effective with 20% solar cells